Question

I have a UITextField in my iOS app. When a user enters text and clicks Return, the keyboard goes away due to a call to an IBAction with “resignFirstResponder.”

However, XCode does not let me drag a line from the UIView itself to File Owner. How do I associate touching the background of a UIView with an IBAction that makes the keyboard go away?

Answer 1

You’ve already noticed that you can’t drag from the UIView to the file’s owner to assoctiate an action with a touch.

The way to work around this is to change the class of the background view from UIView to UIControl and hook up an action from there to a method in your controller to stop editing.

That’s because a UIControl can respond to touch events, and a UIView does not, but a UIControl subclasses UIView, and so it can be used in place of a UIView.

I wrote an example project a while ago that uses this technique. Have a look at the secondViewController‘s xib file and see how I’ve change the class of the background view and hooked it up to a an action in the controller to dismiss the keyboard.